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Chris Kelsey's Ingenious Gentlemen Quartet: Situational Music
by Derek Taylor
From a purely financial perspective choosing improvised music as a profession has to rank among the most foolhardy and frustrating. Along with other artistic gigs like acting and writing improvised music is not widely regarded as a viable means of making ends meet. To take the argument further and generalize it a little, in the logical scheme of things, being an artist in America simply doesn’t pay. This is a sad certainty of life that saxophonist Chris Kelsey is intimately ...
Continue ReadingChris Kelsey's Unacknowledged Ensemble: Hear With Your Ear
by Derek Taylor
As Kelsey’s third offering in a threesome of inaugural titles on his own Saxophonis label Hear With Your Ears is arguably the most demanding both in terms of density and duration. Modeled loosely after Cecil Taylor’s now legendary unit with Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray the ensemble moves across the broad girth and breadth of two long-form improvisations that unfurl from atonal single-line melodies. Like other ensembles inspired by Taylor’s seminal aggregate (the Schlippenbach Trio comes to mind) the influence ...
Continue ReadingChris Kelsey: In Search Of Emmett Hardy
by AAJ Staff
Chris Kelsey is an original. The soprano saxophonist and composer hailing from New York by way of Oklahoma, has a distinct sound that doesn't seem to be coming from any external influences, but rather from within. As a composer, Kelsey writes music that is influenced by the jazz avant-garde, but also has clearly been influenced by impressionist and serialist composers such as Anton Webern and John Cage. His use of 12-tone clusters interspersed with modulating minor-thirds bears this out. In ...
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